17M

There was a sharp intake of breath last month when the pharmaceuticals group AstraZeneca cemented chief executive Pascal Soriot’s position as the best-paid FTSE 100 boss with a £17m pay package, up from £15.3m a year earlier. The latest award brings to £137m the amount he has earned since joining in 2012.While it drew the anger of corporate governance experts, Soriot’s generous payout was just a fraction of the sums his counterparts at the biggest US companies take home. Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Google’s parent company,…

In 2014, investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel infamously posed the distinction between companies that deal in “atoms” versus those that deal in “bits.” In its crudest terms, the former category includes businesses focused on things like hardware and manufacturing; the latter, software and financial services. Just shy of 10 years on, the distinction now strikes as quaint, if not downright irrelevant. Over the past five or so years, a new cohort of startups have emerged. In some ways, they resemble Silicon Valley of…